Editorial: Michigan GOP's court shake-up bill is an affront to the rule of law

Nov. 8, 2013

Republicans disingenuously claim that the change is designed to assure that Court of Claims cases are heard by judges elected by voters throughout the state. In reality, it's straight up partisanship. / 2006 photo by PATRICIA BECK/Detroit Free Press

Written by

the Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

Gov. Rick Snyder is poised to sign a bill that would funnel most lawsuits against his administration to a tiny, handpicked group of Republican judges.

Ramrodded through the GOP-controlled Legislature with unseemly speed, Senate Bill 652 is a terrible piece of legislation that mocks the centuries-old principle of judicial independence, and Snyder should withhold his approval until lawmakers make substantive improvements.

Since 1979, when legislators established it as a function of the Lansing-based Ingham County Circuit Court, the state Court of Claims has heard most major litigation against the state, including lawsuits challenging the legal authority of state agencies or the constitutionality of laws adopted by the Legislature.

SB 652, introduced just two weeks ago by state Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge, would expand the Court of Claims’ jurisdiction to include many matters currently heard in county circuit courts, including lawsuits filed under the Freedom of Information Act to force disclosure of government documents. The bill would also shift responsibility for hearing Court of Claims cases to the state Court of Appeals.

Republicans disingenuously claim that the change is designed to assure that Court of Claims cases are heard by judges elected by voters throughout the state, not just voters from Ingham County. Their real beef is with a Democratic Ingham County electorate that historically has favored judicial candidates with ties to the Democratic Party and/or organized labor.

The original rationale for vesting Court of Claims jurisdiction in Ingham County was to minimize the expense of dispatching state employees and lawyers to answer lawsuits filed there. Shifting Court of Claims cases to venues as remote as the Fourth District Court of Appeals in Grand Rapids will likely increase costs for both parties in many Court of Claims matters. But even then, Jones’ bill might be defensible if it merely moved jurisdiction from the predominantly Democratic Ingham Circuit to the predominantly Republican Court of Appeals.

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But this is no simple case of shoe-is-on-the-other-foot partisanship.

Cases filed in the Court of Claims are currently assigned to one of the Ingham County Circuit Court’s nine judges by blind draw. The Court of Appeals boasts 28 judges divided among four geographical divisions, but under Jones’ bill all Court of Claims cases would be assigned to one of just four judges handpicked by the Republican-led Supreme Court.

And although Jones claims his purpose is to make sure the judges assigned to Court of Claims cases have been elected by voters throughout the state, his bill would allow the Supreme Court to exclude judges from the Detroit-based First District Court of Appeals and the Lansing-based Fourth District. If the bill passes, it will be a simple matter for Chief Justice Robert Young Jr. to stack the reconfigured Court of Claims with Snyder-appointed judges predisposed to toss out any claim against the administration.

The GOP’s ambition to thwart any meaningful judicial review of the Republican legislation or executive action is so transparent that even Bruce Timmons, who has counseled House Republicans on judicial matters for more than four decades, opined in a hearing before the House Government Operations Committee that Jones’ bill amounted to “rigging the deck for those who have to appear in court.”

Snyder seems impervious to these principled objections. “It’s great that we’re going to have judges from all parts of Michigan hear those cases and decide those cases,” he told the Michigan Information and Research Service, declining to address the substantive shortcomings raised by critics in both parties.

Such flim-flammery ill suits the man who campaigned on a platform of transparency and fair play. More and more, the governor who likes to protest that he is not a politician is behaving like the most cynical politician of them all.